Research

The Beatson group aims to better understand the molecular mechanisms of infectious disease and identify potential therapeutic and diagnostic targets by exploiting “Next-gen” genomic data. This will enable us to further understand how medically important bacteria cause disease, become resistant to antibiotics and disseminate globally. Our major focus is the role of mobile genetic elements in the evolution of virulence and antimicrobial resistance amongst pathogens such as Escherichia coli, Streptococcus pyogenes, and Pseudomonas aeruginosa. Our group develops new computational approaches for the rapid analysis of bacterial genome data from the latest sequencing technologies.

Current projects range from researching fundamental questions such as “how has Escherichia coli pathogenesis evolved?” and “how are genes transferred between bacteria?” to the identification of potential diagnostic and vaccine targets and the development of software tools to enable integrated analysis of 100’s or 1000’s of bacterial genomes.

Recent research highlights

NHMRC Funding

Congratulations to Dr Scott Beatson on being awarded a Level 2 NHMRC Career Development Fellowship. The project was titled “Bacterial Pathogenomics: whole-genome sequencing to investigate infection transmission, pathogenesis and antibiotic resistance”. A total of $455 452 was awarded and will begin in 2015.

Complete genome of representative ST131 strain

We determined the complete genome sequence of Escherichia coli EC958: a high quality reference sequence for the globally disseminated multidrug resistant E. coli O25b:H4-ST131 clone. We used a 3rd generation sequencing technology, PacBio SMRT sequencing to determine this genome and associated plasmids. We declare that “Large discrepancies between ST131 genomes are likely due to misassembly of E. coli NA114″. [Link]

Escherichia coli ST131

In April 2014 we had a large scale study of E. coli ST131 published in PNAS. We wrote a blog post about the importance of this study. Both UQ News and 7 News presented a news articles about this study. The data is available on GitHub.

Follow us on Twitter

Big congrats due to Doctor Leah Roberts (@Loolibear), awarded PhD this week, next week takes up her EMBL-EBI Fellowship at University of Cambridge and EBI with @ZaminIqbal and @EsteeTorok. We will miss you! Best wishes for a bright future. Scott @beatsonlab @LabSchembri @ace_uq